Since Google’s release of Google’s +1 button, webmasters have wondered about the effect of this on their web page rankings. In an interview,
Google’s Matt Cutts commented on this and on the effect of authorship on your rankings.

At this time, +1 clicks are not that important

In the interview, Matt Cutts said
the following about the importance of +1 clicks:

“In
the short term, we’re still going to have to study and see how good the signal is. Right now, there’s not really a direct effect where if you have a lot of +1s, you’ll rank higher.”

Authorship seems to be more important

In the same interview, Matt Cutts
commented on the effect of authorship:

“There are
things like, we have an authorship proposal, where you can use nice
standards to markup your webpage, and you’ll actually see a picture of
the author right there, and it turns out that if you see a picture of
the author, sometimes you’ll have higher click through, and people will
say, ‘oh, that looks like a trusted resource.’

So
there are ways that you can participate and sort of get ready for the
longer term trend of getting to know not just that something was said,
but who said it and how reputable they were.

If
you look further out in the future and look at something that we call
‘social signals’ or ‘authorship’ or whatever you want to call it, in
ten years, I think knowing that a really reputable guy – if Dan has
written an article, whether it’s a comment on a forum or on a blog – I
would still want to see that. So that’s the long-term trend.”

What does this mean for your website rankings?

1. Google +1 clicks:

Google +1 clicks have no direct
impact on your rankings but they can still help you to get more
conversions. Many people see Google’s +1 button in the search results
and a high number of +1 clicks could create more trust. If the number
of overall +1 clicks increases, Google could also use +1 clicks as a
more important ranking signal in the future.

2. Authorship:

Authorship could be a more
important ranking signal in the future. If your website provides
content that can be attributed to a particular author, authorship verification could help your site. At
this time, the effect of a verified authorship on the rankings of your
website seems to be low.

This could simply be an attempt to
get more Google+ users.

Google +1 clicks and authorship can be the icing on the cake if your
web page already has good rankings. These signals alone won’t get your
website on Google’s first result page.

If you want to see your website in the top 10 results, your web pages
must have all the signals that are necessary to please Google’s
algorithm. Google uses more than 200 ranking signals in its algorithm.

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